1 Abuse of tree ring data
2 cherry picking data
3 Over weighting of proxies by placing weights in the /Fortran code
4 Blocking release of data
5 Playing the I am sick excuse

Shed a little November heat on this and Briffa is exposed.

Is there a winner?

What is the outcome of this debate?

Is one tree “YAD061″ really the sole driver of all of Briffa’s ‘significant’ data? (that would be so hard to believe.)

Scott, you are clearly trying to divert attention with your unending reference to unrelated and doubtful “facts” please give it a rest.

Richard,

BTW, greenhouse gases do precisely this.

I suppose in your books H2O is not a natural forcing mechanism, nor all the other naturally occuring green house gases ( including the trace CO2 of course).

And while we are at it, can you give the forcing agents that created in our past a plot like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Holocene_Temperature_Variations.png
?

I thought not.

19 of the warmest years have occurred in the past 25 years. The warmest years globally have been 1998 and 2005 with the years 2002, 2007, and 2003 close behind. The warmest decade has been the last ten years and the warming has been widespread globally. 2009 is likely to finish Top 10 or Top 5.

Unfortunately, the greatest warming is predicted to be in the second half of this century even if we come to our senses and limit greenhouse gas emissions. We may look back at the record decades of today as being “the cool period of this century.” Sad.

What is sad is that you have not understood my example about rates of change: the derivative of sin(at) is cos(at), which means that the rate of change can be as big as the change as time progresses in oscillating functions.

Go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Holocene_Temperature_Variations.png to see that oscillation is the description of data since the Holocene started.
All your statements would hold if you go and sit at 1500 years ago on the rise of one of the curves. It is inevitable that rates increase, either sign, when there is oscillating behavior.

Maybe your math skills are not up to understanding this? It would explain why you keep harping on the rate of change.

Look at this record of the holocene that shows oscillating temperatures:

Be so kind as to explain how the PDO causes stratospheric cooling. Actually, I would love to hear how ANY natural forcing mechanism can warm the troposphere while at the same time cool the stratosphere.

BTW, greenhouse gases do precisely this.

There are degrees of twaddle, and this one of yours is off the measurement scale.

You say;
“My numbers were shown as degrees F per decade. Are you suggesting that the slope of temperature vs. decade is not increasing as one moves from 1850 toward present day? Surely you can see that the slope per decade is increasing.”

Rubbish! The last decade has shown no rise.

My point is valid. Your assertion of increasing global warming over recent decades is as valid as the MBH ‘hockey stick’ analysis because
(a) you are comparing different time periods
and
(b) you are using linear trends to assess fluctuating time series.

The various global temperature reconstructions (e.g. GISS, HadCRUT3) show two combined trends; viz, recovery from the Little Ice Age, and fluctuations of 60 year periodicity which coincide with the phases of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO).

The fluctuations provide cooling to ~1910, cooling from ~1940 to ~1970, and there has been cooling since about 2000. So, the reconstructions show similar length of time cooling as warming.

The most that can be said is that the rate of warming in the two warming periods is greater than the rate of cooling in the cooling periods and, therefore, the temperature was higher at the end of the twentieth century than at the start of the century. And the global temperature has fallen since then.

However, very importantly, the rate of warming in the two periods of warming was the same. One of those periods was prior to 1940 (i.e. 1910 to 1940) and the other was after 1940 (i.e. 1970 to 1998). But about 85% of all the emissions of greenhouse gases from human activity was after 1940.

Clearly, there is no reason to suppose that the period of warming from 1970 to 1998 was induced by the emissions from human activity when the earlier – and similar – period of warming could not have been. And that warming is part of the recovery from the Little Ice Age that began three centuries ago (i.e. prior to the industrial revolution).

Richard

The answer is simple: Because Briffa will NOT explain it fully and answer questions about how he did his work.

There is a reason for that, and it is that the answer will look even worse than the silence.

There is NOTHING about this whole controversy that McIntyre is not willing to discuss publicly. If only Briffa were behaving in the same fashion.

One cannot use 40 years worth of data to calculate a 100 year trend. :)

My numbers were shown as degrees F per decade. Are you suggesting that the slope of temperature vs. decade is not increasing as one moves from 1850 toward present day? Surely you can see that the slope per decade is increasing.

19 of the warmest years have occurred in the past 25 years. The warmest years globally have been 1998 and 2005 with the years 2002, 2007, and 2003 close behind. The warmest decade has been the last ten years and the warming has been widespread globally. 2009 is likely to finish Top 10 or Top 5.

It is almost a certainty that 2001-2010 will be the warmest decade since 1850. Since 1980, each decade is getting warmer than the last.

Unfortunately, the greatest warming is predicted to be in the second half of this century even if we come to our senses and limit greenhouse gas emissions. We may look back at the record decades of today as being “the cool period of this century.” Sad.

you said

“BTW, Mann eta al.’s plot was essentially the same with or without tree rings. Shocker!!

However, when making a selection amongst facts, then of course any abberation or conclusion can be reproduced. If I was to take a sample of 1000 people from the streets of NYC and count colours and nationalities there would be quite a few. Then I narrow it down to 20 people to take a proxy and deliberately choose white people from that 1000, and on this basis say “everyone in NYC is white”

In reference to such faulty methodology of producing an preconceived result, I refer ou to:

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/04/11/making-holocene-spaghetti-sauce-by-proxy/

we see that some 50 non tree ring temperature proxies combined shows a MWP around 0,4 K warmer than today, lasting at least 500 years, and that most of the Holocene was warmer than today

As such, propositions of this nature are not amenable to rational argument.